The recent lottery-funded Grow Wild campaign has been such a success that the 230,000 free seed packs on offer were snapped up in a single day. The lucky recipients were bidden to grow the plants in their gardens or to “create a stylish window box”. Yet the campaign, which aims to get “the British nation to grow wild flowers in urban areas”, is being conducted under the aegis of Kew Gardens, which surely knows that the point about wild flowers is that they are wild.

Wild flowers can grow only where the cultural conditions are right. Their diversity is the consequence of their extreme pickiness. We all have wild flowering plants growing in our gardens, pavements, lawns and parks; we call them weeds and do everything we can to blight and annihilate them. They have found their niche, but we refuse to let them occupy it. Yet we truly believe that we love wild flowers.

Earnest people have been cynically misled over the wild flower issue for generations. Every garden centre, even as it made its money out of distributing tough Dutch-grown annuals complete with superbugs, featured a stand of wild flower seeds, of unknown provenance, equally mysterious age and astonishingly high price. Innocent people bought the seeds and cast them about, in the hope of a bumper crop of foxgloves and harebells amid the nettles and cow parsley that have invaded most waste ground in this country.

The young gardeners who borrowed my back garden for a season turned up one day in spring with a packet of what purported to be meadow flower seeds and asked innocently whether I would mind if they sowed them on my land. I asked them in my turn whether they were dissatisfied with the wild flowers that were growing there already. They didn’t think there were any. So I spent many hours prowling my three acres, camera in hand, photographing every wild herb as it came on flower. I never did give them the album in the end; I decided that I was being too crabby in response to such a well-meaning (if infuriating) mistake.

The Grow Wild seed pack for England and Wales contains common knapweed, field poppy, corn camomile, corn cockle, cornflower, corn marigold, hedge bedstraw, meadow buttercup, meadowsweet, ox-eye daisy and red campion. It should be clear from the “corn” word that four of these 11 species (five including the poppy) are field flowers rather than true wild flowers, because they have evolved to be dependent on cultivation rather than in depauperate, undisturbed ground. The thinking behind this silent substitution is probably that people who make the effort want to see a result, and red, gold and blue will give them a “show”, but they are more likely to see nothing for their trouble. Even the cornfield species have different requirements; some will stare into the eye of the summer sun, while others would rather grow on the other side of the hedge or in a damp and shady ditch.

In the past the wild flower seed sold in British garden centres was most likely to have been collected in central Europe. We are not told the provenance of the seed distributed under the Grow Wild scheme, but their website utters a disconcerting warning: “To protect wild flowers already growing in the countryside from cross-pollination with the flowers in your kit, please make sure that you don’t sow seeds in or near open countryside or near nature reserves.” (Or, presumably, anywhere else where the species are likely to establish themselves.) The seed is said to come from the UK Native Seed Hub, which exists to build “awareness and demand for best practice habitat restoration and conservation using high-quality UK native plan materials”.

If you missed out on the Grow Wild freebie, you have not lost your chance to do something for Britain’s disappearing wild flowers. The weeds in your garden are all flowering plants, though you may not like their flowers much or even be aware that they have flowers. Yarrow, tansy, ragwort, toadflax, mulleins, mallows, clovers, willow-herbs, dead nettles, comfreys, speedwells – all are wild flowers. Some of them you hate, the bindweeds and ground ivies, maybe; but the bees and hoverflies love them. You will do more for Britain’s disappearing wild flower species if you give up weeding than you would if you planted a dozen Grow Wild seed packs.

At the same time as the lottery was funding free seed packs for the unwary, more and more local authorities have been mowing road verges, or renting road verges to local businesses who financed the mowing for them. Rather than spending scarce resources on introducing field flowers to places where they have never grown, people who care should seek out those verges that used to be the last refuge for some very special plants, where the sign “Protected Verge” stands uselessly amid the shorn grasses.

On behalf of our thousands of wild flower species, I beg you to photograph the signs with the barren sward around them, and badger the local authority by letter and petition to raise its game. Our council taxes are being spent on extirpating local wild flowers at the same time that lottery funding is being used to help people grow corn cockle in a window box. Stupid? You bet.

When the wild things that overtake your plantings are as lovely as the two kinds of Star of Bethlehem that are happier in my garden than anything I have ever brought to it, it is easy to refrain from weeding. I am also thrilled that spurge laurel (Daphne laureola) sees fit to romp all over the borders, seeing as you can pay £60 for a single specimen in a pot. So sit back, dear reader, relax – and let nature take over.